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Big Calm

Big Calm

The most groove-oriented act in the mid-'90s female-fronted electronica crowd, Morcheeba rely on the sweet, fluid vocals of Skye Edwards and a laid-back mix of fusion, funk, and blues produced by brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey on beats/scratches and guitar/keyboards, respectively. The trio was formed in 1995 when the Godfreys decided to go out on their own after co-producing six tracks for David Byrne's album Feelings.

Chaos And The Calm

Amongst its twelve tracks, James Bay's Chaos And The Calm features the singles Hold Back the River and Let It Go. Driven by his soulful delivery, captivating storytelling, and inimitable spirit, he's poised to capture the attention of listeners worldwide within the next year. Already, numerous tastemakers are predicting big things for BAY in 2015. A multitude of major news sources have chosen him as one of 2015 s Artist to Watch. In addition The New York Times named Let It Go as one of 2014's best songs.

Back home, he recently received the high honor of the BRIT Critics Choice Award, an honor previously won by none other than Adele, Florence + the Machine, Sam Smith, Jessie J, and many other superstars. He s also been put on the Long List for BBC 1 Sound of 2015. BAY hails from the tiny town of Hitchin, but he cut his teeth performing at London s iconic venues including opening for The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, opening for two sold out tours with Kodaline, John Newman and Tom Odell. It was at one of these very performances that a fan filmed his set and shared the video on YouTube. The video quickly caught the attention of Republic Records who ended up flying BAY to New York and signing him on the spot. This fall he was selected to perform at the Burberry's Prosum Spring/Summer Fashion Show and the iTunes Music Festival. BAY is now set to kick off his second sold out headlining tour of the UK.

1. Craving2. Hold Back The River3. Let It Go4. If You Ever Want To Be In Love5. Best Fake Smile6. When We Were On Fire7. Move Together8. Scars9. Collide10. Get Out While You Can11. Need The Sun To Break12. Incomplete

Skye & Ross

For over a dozen years, Ross and Skye had been playing across the globe as Morcheeba, but Ross' brother, Paul - their co-producer, with whom they'd founded the band - had stayed at home. During this time, the inevitable separation between what happened in the studio and what happened live had become increasingly pronounced, and, as they observed the band beside them with delight, the singer and guitarist shared an epiphany. "Why don't we make our records feel more live?"

The result of this revelation is SKYE | ROSS, an album that pursues its own musical path while returning to the roots of the sound that made Morcheeba a household name back in the late 1990s. It is, Ross explains, "what Skye and I do naturally when you ask us to make music together, and yet not necessarily a continuation of what we'd been doing with Morcheeba. It therefore felt only right to give it a new identity."

What emerged recalls the spirit of Morcheeba's international, platinum selling Big Calm, while boasting a revived spirit and the mature experience that comes with two decades of making music.

Ultimately, SKYE | ROSS doesn't signify the end of Morcheeba, but rather a purge of sorts, an opportunity for the two musicians who have represented the public face of their band to exploit the musical relationship that has developed between them outside of the studio on stages around the world. "Our intentions are really aligned," Ross concludes, "and once you have that synchronicity with someone everything falls into place."

1. Repay The Saviour2. Light Of Gold3. All My Days4. How To Fly5. Clear My Mind6. Hold On7. Medicine8. Feet First9. Head Home10. The Point Of No Return

In Het Midden Van Alles

Import

The new album from Dutch BLØF pride is called In The Middle Of Everything and includes the single Spijt Heb Je Morgen Maar and Open Je Ogen, which the band recorded together with Ilse DeLange. Immediately after the release of In The Middle Of Everything was the album at number one in the iTunes charts.

In The Middle Of Everything, the eleventh studio album from the band Zeeland, was included in the South of France Carpentras and completed in the ICP studios in Brussels where BLØF previously recorded the Upper and Water Makers albums. For the first time in the band worked again with producer JB Meijers, who was also responsible for writing the hit song Calm After The Storm by The Common Linnets' (Ilse Delange and Waylon) on the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 high pitched eyes. Together with singer-songwriter and producer Ken Stringfellow crowds Meijers a big mark on the sound of the album, which sounds more layered and more relevant than ever.

It's always exciting to bring a new record. Of course we are very happy with all the positive reactions to the music. It is crazy that we are at one. We enjoy also very much to play live all the new songs says Paskal Jakobsen.

Stiff

Three years on from their critically acclaimed "barbeque" record Corsicana Lemonade, White Denim are back with more than just a new album to commemorate. Their sixth record, Stiff - out 25 March 2016 via Downtown/Sony Red - is a return to the Austin quartet's frenetic rock band roots, and is both a jubilant thrill ride and joyous celebration of their past ten years. Heading into the studio with an external producer to oversee a whole album for the first time - and even writing a tune with Cass McCombs ('Thank You') - the band teamed up with the legendary Ethan Johns (Paul McCartney, Laura Marling, The Staves) to produce their first truly live record, one teeming with a cool '70s undertow, tumultuous riffs and a feverish energy that's resulted in arguably some of their biggest and brawniest songs to date.

With drummer Joshua Block and guitarist Austin Jenkins now pursuing other production ventures, vocalist/guitarist James Petralli and bassist Steve Terebecki spent a long time reassessing exactly what White Denim meant to them. "The big thing for Steve and I was trying to define what made us want to keep going," Petralli explains of the album's early days. "What's our partnership about? What's cool about this? We learnt a lot making D and Corsicana Lemonade. We wanted to take some of those lessons and apply it back to our original mission statement. We were trying to get back to some of the things that made us excited about the band in the first place."

Opener 'Had 2 Know (Personal)' is the embodiment of that mission statement. Described by Petralli as "a reassertion of our initial intent to make songs that satisfy our urge to play fast", it sets the tone brilliantly for the bulk of Stiff, right from its idiosyncratic, Red Krayola-sampling beginning to its huge, golden era chorus. While it remains distinctively White Denim, there's a reinvigoration permeating through its riffs via new guitarist Jonathan Horne and a beefed-up rhythm section thanks to the work of new drummer Jeffrey Olson. Every single high octane turn - from the tremendously fun 'Ha Ha Ha Ha (Yeah)' to the outrageously shredding 'Holda You (I'm Psycho)' - sounds like a band re-energised and revitalised, resulting in what Petralli describes as a "high heat, high energy, good times record". Having previously sold out Shepherd's Bush Empire and having toured with Tame Impala and Arctic Monkeys, Stiff is full to the brim with songs that sound ready to now lift White Denim to similar heights.

For the most part, Stiff is an album crammed with adrenaline-fuelled sing-alongs that show off the band's staple technical abilities. But it's also one that sees some new shades that they've developed along the way, too. Citing new wave and the razor-sharp pop punk of Buzzcocks as influences this time round, there's an addictive Elvis Costello circa This Year's Model quality to 'Real Deal Momma', a tune that highlights the band's love for hummable synthesisers and curious, affecting oddities. Then there's the cow bell calm and backing vocals laden brilliance of 'I'm The One (Big Big Fun)', that along with 'Take It Easy (Ever After Lasting Love)' (a song Petralli says "wants to be on a collection of doo wop songs written in 2016") shows a softer and more intricate side to the band while fully emphasising Petralli's vocal excellence.

Of the artwork - which was created by collagist Eugenia Loli - was inspired and worked from the band's previous album covers and videos as a visual template. Ultimately, it's a fleeting visit to a place the band have been before, with the covers of Workout Holiday and D being collages too. Stiff was even originally stylised 'Stif', which when spelt backwards spells out the title of their second full-length Fits. Then there's 'Mirrored In Reverse', a nod to the Fits track 'Mirrored And Reverse'. "I mean, we're ten!" Petralli says in disbelief while explaining all of the record's throwbacks. "We did think about naming this record Ten and referencing the Pearl Jam cover!"

Recorded with nothing but equipment that Petralli describes as being "past a certain point in the '70s", he explains that Stiff is an album made "entirely the old way". "It was tracked live to 16-track tape with very little overdubs," he says. "It was very hardcore record making - traditional in every aspect." Recorded with Ethan Johns in Asheville, North Carolina over a twenty-day period, Petralli and the band had an intense but deeply educational time with Johns. "It was really cool. The guy had these stories that were just unbelievable. He started talking about playing with Jimmy Page when he was a kid, and he lived in the studio where The Rolling Stones and The Faces would just hang out. Having Ethan in the room pushing us really made it more of an 'in the moment' and a visual thing. Capturing live performances is what he does really well."

To make things even more celebratory, there was an extra ten day stint spent with go-to White Denim man Jim Vollentine, who Petralli describes as "my guy, man". He continues: "we've made a lot of records together now. When we left the studio in Asheville with Ethan, we thought we gotta work on this record some more, you know? Though it was really just mixing, which we did with respect to Ethan's arrangements and his recording. I feel like I really haven't made anything like this before."

Ultimately, Stiff is the sound of a band finding their feet again and having the time of their lives. It's a record that refuses to buckle under the pressures of life, instead offering up a soundtrack to sing, dance, shout and scream along to. As a White Denim album, it's a joyride through the past ten years of the band's idiosyncratic catalogue while simultaneously pushing things further forward into new territories. "It's similar to our first record [Workout Holiday] in that we found the initial energy and just went with that," Petralli says of the initial studio spark that started it all. "We thought, what's the fundamental thing that made us want to get into a van and quit our terrible jobs and start this whole thing in the first place? And it was loud, fast-playing, rock and roll."

No Love Deep Web

Death Grips shocked the world and their record label when they released their second release of the year No Love Deep Web, but upon listening it's pretty clear that this is a mixtape that the label had no intention of releasing. No Love Deep Web was probably just an elaborate way to hype up the band, and it's safe to say it worked. No Love Deep Web had over 34.2 million downloads on BitTorrent thanks to the help of Twitter, and I think its safe to say their plan worked. Speaking of the album itself, it employs very minimalistic stripped down beats and has a much chiller vibe overall compared to the previous two records. That doesn't mean the beats are soft though, because they are harder than the phallus on the album cover. No Love Deep Web is one big grimy middle finger to the music industry and one of the most sordid albums ever released by a group on a major label.

This isn't your father's hip hop, but that should be common knowledge by now. If you go into this expecting insightful lyrics and smooth flow over catchy beats you're going to have a bad time, hell even if you expect to understand the lyrics most of the time you're going to get very little out of No Love Deep Web. MC Ride is his schizophrenic self on tracks like No Love and World Of Dogs, but he also comes down to earth and actually calms down a bit on tracks like Artificial Death In The West adding a lot more depth to their sound. The whole album feels like the fever dreams of a severely withdrawn drug addict, tracks like World Of Dogs, No Love and Hunger Games sound like a sick drug addicts crash back down to earth and their gritty existence. The line I got some *** to say just for the *** of it perfectly encapsulates not only MC Ride's style, but No Love Deep Web, and Death Grips' whole career.

The beats on this thing are raw and stripped down, some of the tracks don't even have a melody some of the time, just drums and vocals like in Lock Your Doors. The beats are fidgety electronic bells and whistles, lots of interesting sounds and synths creating a gritty atmosphere for MC Ride to spit his insane lyrics over. The rawness and harsh production of the beats help point to the fact that this is a mixtape and not a studio release, the minimalistic approach also creates a fresh sound compared to the over produced and at times gimmicky production on The Money Store, and this approach will likely convert a few people who were not fond of the over the top nature of The Money Store.

No Love Deep Web inevitably sounds a tad rushed, no *** it was made in only a few months, but it definitely did its job as a hype generator. It doesn't do enough different to warrant its early release date and the band's sound is getting a bit tiring. The main problem though is the lack of standout tracks, with most of the hooks gone and with such stripped down beats a lot of the songs blend together in an unflattering way. Exhausting as it can be at times, No Love Deep Web turned out to be another great addition to Death Grips' ever expanding discography that is likely to turn a few heads just as all of their previous work has done.

AmpsandSound Seneca Horn-Loaded Loudspeaker

Have a question about this product? Please email ouraudio advisor or call 1-877-929-8729 with any questions or concerns regarding your equipment purchase.

AmpsandSound Products Are Handmade In Small Batches and Go Through Extensive Quality Control

The Seneca is AmpsandSound's nod to studio monitors. Inspired by the flat response and dynamic range of the best studio monitors from TAD and JBL, the Seneca is a 2way horn loaded monitor. They've combined a massive 15" woofer for effortless bass and 2" beryllium compression driver provides for lighting fast transient, wide bandwidth and ultra-low distortion.

The Seneca like the Hudson is a partial horn-loaded loudspeaker system configured as an ultra-wide bandwidth 2way. The foundation of the Seneca is a direct radiating 15" woofer for low frequencies, providing usable bass into the 35hz range and crossing to the Mid-Horn @ 500hz. The Seneca mates a modern high-efficiency compression driver to Elliptical traxtrix horn. The reduction of a crossover point and driver increases coherence without sacrificing high frequency information. The concept of the Seneca is to have big horns, state of the art crossovers and drivers into the smallest form factor possible; and yielding bass response, efficiency, dynamic capabilities, low distortion, and scale of much larger designs in a much smaller enclosure.

The Seneca had long been utilized by ampsandsound's founder in his personal system due to its more relaxed presentation. The core design was revisited with the development of the Hudson. Now paired with our newest crossover design and utilizing one of the most a calmed mid ranges, the Senenca was transformed into a loudspeaker capable of life like realism. Gone was the reference to a good sounding speaker, but now music was described as hearing the artist just feet away from you; as if you were at the counsel in the studio and they were playing to just you.

Its compact size makes it capable of being installed into even small most rooms, minimizes room interactions. Front ported and horn loaded reduces back wall interaction. The Seneca offers dynamic range, life like scale, tonal accuracy will appeal to audiophiles who desire all of the positive attributes of horn-loaded designs but without the issues of size and room interaction that are inherent to many designs.

The Seneca features a state of the art hand-wired crossover network, which utilizes high-order filters, and minimal driver lover lap, through use of large air-core inductors for low signal loss. If the heart of the Seneca is its horns and midrange, the crossover represents its cerebral cortex. The Seneca is art though design, providing detail rich rendering without coloration. Its crossover minimizes frequency overlap, and achieves phase coherence and perfect time alignment. Its crossover is hand-made and built to the same rigorous standards as our amplifiers and loudspeakers, utilizing Hyper-litz inductors and low Q capacitors. Each crossover weighs more than 15 pounds and is unlike anything you've seen or heard in horn-loaded loudspeakers.

The Seneca's bass section utilizes a 15 woofer in a direct-radiating configuration that is front-ported to minimize interaction with front walls. Through the use of FFT analysis, ampsandsound has carefully built an inert cabinet that features strategic bracing and dampening. As a result, the Hudson is capable of high output with minimal excursion, and greatly reduced levels of distortion over conventional designs.

The heart of the Seneca is its large CNC-cut midrange horn, which utilizes a hybrid tractrix flare, providing controlled horizontal dispersion and limiting vertical dispersion to reduce room interactions. The midrange horn is mated to a 2 large-format midrange compression driver with beryllium diaphragm. No need for a tweeter with a midrange capable of extending past 20khz and providing a rule flat midrange. The combination of a large, precision-made wood horn with a large throat and large midrange compression driver has resulted in a midrange that is tonally accurate, yet rich with detail. The midrange is smooth, fast-sounding, and easy to listen to for hours.

AmpsandSound

$20,000.00

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The Journey Man

"In my music," says Goldie, "is everything I've learned, everyone I've met, everything I've experienced." And it's been an incredible trip. The maverick innovator - who rewrote the future of the jungle scene with landmark releases that still sound like they were kidnapped from tomorrow - has a unique story to tell. From children's homes in the West Midlands through stints in New York and Miami as one of the UK's most celebrated exponents of graffiti art to rubbing shoulders with an exceptional list of musical collaborators including David Bowie, Noel Gallagher and KRS-One, Goldie has defiantly, definitively, done it his own way. "I'm an alchemist," he likes to insist. "I practice the dark arts of messing with the form of something solid."

Though marriage and his passion for bikram yoga have, he says, proved a calming influence, these days he's just as full of inspired, out-there ideas as he was back in 1993 when he did his first cover interview for the rave magazine Generator. "My music is about fallout," he said then, "about the damage that has been done to the system." Today, in the office of one of his London-based contacts, the ideas are still sparking. "Drum'n'bass has done to electronic music what graffiti has done to the art world," he muses, before launching into a rapid-fire synthesis of art history, dancefloor evolution and his own hyperactive brand of self-actualization, which loosely translates as: "Why do something ordinary when you can do something extraordinary?"

It sums up the reason why, in 1994, music critic Simon Reynolds famously observed: "Goldie revolutionized jungle not once but three times. First, there was Terminator (pioneering the use of time stretching), then Angel (fusing Diane Charlemagne's live vocal with David Byrne/Brian Eno samples to prove that hardcore could be more conventionally musical), now there's Timeless, a 22-minute hardcore symphony." Each of these were moments that shaped the musical fabric of the decade and beyond, presaging Goldie's transition from the underground rave scene into the world of bona fide A- list superstars.

But it didn't start out like that. The boy who would become Goldie was born Clifford Price on 19 September 1965, just as The Rolling Stones hit the top of the charts with Satisfaction. His dad Clement, originally from Jamaica, had been plying his trade as a foundryman in Leeds. His mum Margaret, who had been born in Glasgow, was a popular singer in the pubs and clubs of the West Midlands. Barely more than a toddler, Goldie was just three when she placed him into foster care (though she kept his younger brother Melvin). He still remembers, he says, the day the social workers came to take him away.

Over the next 15 years, he bounced between a series of foster homes and local government institutions around the Walsall area. His eclectic musical taste was forged, he reckons, in those same local authority homes listening to the sonic tangle of other teenagers' record collections. "In one room," he says, "a kid would be playing Steel Pulse while through the wall someone else had a Japan record on and another guy would be spinning Human League." On rare visits to see his dad, he'd lie sprawled over the living room couch, listening to Jazz FM, marveling at the lavishly-tooled '80s productions of Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, David Sanborn and Michael Franks, adding further layers to his complex musicography.

Already developing the irresistible urge to excel that has marked his inimitable musical career, Goldie's first love was roller-hockey. He earned a place as goalkeeper in England's national squad before the lure of music overtook the lure of sport. After discovering electro and hip hop, he grew his hair - the "goldilocks" that won him his nickname - and joined a breakdance crew called the B-Boys in nearby Wolverhampton. He also discovered graffiti. "They called me 'the spray can king of the Midlands'," he says proudly. His talent was undeniable, bringing him to the attention not only of Britain's Arts Council but to Dick Fontaine, producer of a Channel 4 TV documentary on graffiti. Fontaine's 1987 film Bombin' captured a visit to the UK by New York artist Brim Fuentes. Brim met Goldie and his B-Boys crew in Wolverhampton's Heathtown before heading a dozen miles away to Birmingham's Handsworth, where the producer filmed the aftermath of rioting that had left four dead, 35 injured and dozens of stores burned out. Several months later, Fontaine reversed the process and took Goldie to New York, introducing him to hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. For Goldie, on his first trip abroad, never mind his first trip over the Atlantic, the Big Apple was love at first sight. Back in Britain, he begged, borrowed and saved until he had enough to fund a return trip to the Bronx.

"I started painting the trains and getting involved on the streets," he says, remembering his total immersion in what was still, at that point, an emerging culture. Art and music as symbiotic technologies. Rubbing shoulders with the Big Apple's best graffiti artists, his own distinctive style was accelerated and enriched. A move to Miami followed. He worked in the flea markets, he says, "painting trucks for drug dealers" and developing a sideline in gold jewelry that included the distinctive grills that became a trademark on his return to the UK. The magical properties of shaping, working and bending precious metals to his will - as close to alchemy as the modern world gets - became an analogue for the way he prefers to operate in the studio, chasing quicksilver dreams, mercury-fast rivulets of imagination into impossibly lush, breakbeat concertos. Back in Britain, Goldie found himself seduced by the sweetheart of the rave. Though it took him eight attempts to get entry into the club, at London's Rage in 1991 he marveled at the alternate sonic worlds being forged by Fabio and Grooverider behind the decks. "It really flipped me out," he remembers. Soon he found himself in the orbit of Dego McFarlane and Mark Clair. Their label Reinforced was in the vanguard of breakbeat, issuing astonishing records that stripped out boundaries and limits while setting the tone for the scene's sense of adventure. At first, he helped out doing artwork and a bit of A&R. But soon he was in Reinforced's Internal Affairs studio watching intently as Mark and Dego recorded tracks like Cookin' Up Ya Brain and Journey From The Light. "I was watching what they could do," says Goldie, "trying to gauge the possibilities of the technology." Soon he was getting involved. "I remember one session we did that lasted over three days," he says, "just experimenting, pushing the technology to its limits. We'd come up with mad ideas and then try to create them. We were sampling from ourselves and then resampling, twisting sounds around and pushing them into all sorts of places."

What followed was a series of inspired break-driven releases such as Killa Muffin, Dark Rider and Menace. Then Terminator, with its writhing drum loop, dropped and suddenly Goldie's name was on everyone's lips. He followed up with the equally revolutionary Angel, tilting the axis towards the lush, trippy textures that made 1995's debut album Timeless the drum'n'bass scene's first platinum album. Incredibly, given what was happening elsewhere in the scene at the time, the recording of the album's epic title track began as far back as 1993, when most other producers were still focused on the original sonic tropes of hardcore rave.

Timeless was a masterpiece - of production, of songwriting, of sonic perfection and breakbeat futurism. Even today, it still sounds as astonishingly new and inspired as it did back on those early pre-release cassettes circulated by London Records in the early months of 1995 when Goldie was still living on the 18th floor of a North London tower block.

By then, Goldie had already set up his own record label - Metalheadz - with his friends the DJ duo Kemistry and Storm. Along with studio collaborator, Rob Playford's Moving Shadow and LTJ Bukem's Looking Good imprint, Metalheadz helped to define drum'n'bass as a distinct musical format with singles by J Majik, Asylum and Goldie himself. Still bursting with energy, he then launched a legendary club night, Metalheadz Sunday Sessions, at London's Blue Note. The scene's best producers - among them revolutionary artists like Photek, Source Direct, Peshay and Dillinja - would compete to have their latest recordings debuted at the club and the scene's faithful came from far and wide to hear the best tunes before anyone else. "Those nights at the Blue Note were magical," he recalls. "It was an underground phenomenon that became an institution." David Bowie, who was making the drum'n'bass-influenced album Earthling at the time, fell in love with the place. "I remember popping out to take a break from all the madness inside the club," says Goldie. "He was outside having a cigarette, a bit of a breather. We chatted for a bit, looked at each other, grinned and then plunged back into it all. It was just that kind of place."

Goldie is one of only a handful of artists ever to co-write with Bowie - on the track Truth from the drum'n'bass pioneer's second album Saturnz Return. Released in 1998, the album also saw his vision become more expansive (the opening track, Mother, clocked in at just over an hour). The album's collaborative approach included guest spots from rap legend KRS-One, Sex Pistols manager and all-around provocateur Malcolm McLaren, super-producer Trevor Horn and Oasis main man Noel Gallagher (on the single Temper Temper).

Fuelled by the limitless creativity that has been the hallmark of his career to date, Goldie next turned to acting. He reunited with Bowie in Andrew Goth's 1999 thriller Everybody Loves Sunshine then took the part of Bullion in the 1999 James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough. Other box office smashes - including Guy Ritchie's crime heist caper Snatch - followed before he joined the cast of BBC1 soap opera EastEnders, playing the gangster Angel Hudson.

A series of blockbuster TV appearances - on shows such as Maestro (where he learned to conduct an orchestra), Classic Goldie (which saw him perform his own orchestral composition at the Royal Albert Hall in the summer of 2009) and Goldie's Band: By Royal Appointment.

The orchestral training proved useful. In 2014, he translated his original vision for Timeless into the stunning Timeless (Sine Tempore). Performed live with the Heritage Orchestra at the Wilderness Festival to suitably rapturous acclaim, the performance was repeated the following year as part of the Meltdown Festival at London's Royal Festival Hall. In between, he found time to unveil Fragments Of Gold, a piece inspired by medieval chants that he performed live in Glasgow Cathedral.

Drum'n'bass, of course, has remained a consistent passion, both through his Metalheadz label and his releases under the Rufige Kru moniker (2007's Malice In Wonderland and 2009's Memoirs Of An Afterlife). "Technologically," he says, "breakbeat has managed to surpass all other forms of music to date. There isn't a recording engineer alive who can tell me there's any other form of music that is more complex than the music we make." Goldie has also recently announced he will be releasing a brand new double album 'The Journey Man' this year. The album comprises two parts, 16 brand new tracks in total, all written and produced by Goldie. It also features a host of collaborators handpicked by Goldie to help realize his vision for the album.

"I often look at music not so much as a producer but like a director. You're drawing together engineers, performers and arrangers to create something special, something magical. It's like alchemy. The notes, the music, the lyrics, they're all in my head and each element has to be communicated and brought to life to create the finished track. I'm always inspired by great movie directors - people like Stanley Kubrick and PT Anderson - and, if you think about it, it's quite a similar approach. They start off with a vision and then they use that vision to deploy the actors and the cameramen and the editors in order to create the finished film."

Collaborators on 'The Journey Man' album include vocalist and songwriter Natalie Duncan, who was discovered when chosen in the three-part BBC series 'Goldie's Band By Royal Appointment' and later provided the vocals for Goldie's 2012 single 'Freedom'. Other featured vocalists on the album include Terri Walker, Tyler Lee Daly, Natalie Williams, JosÉ James, Naomi Pryor as well as Goldie's wife, Mika Wassenaar Price.

'The Journey Man' will be released through Cooking Vinyl and Goldie's own record label, Metalheadz.

Goldie's love affair with painting has remained consistent too and he continues to exhibit visual work that's just as dazzling as his sonic output. Beginning with Night Writers, the 1986 exhibition at Wolverhampton's art gallery that introduced Goldie and his Supreme Graffiti Team to the British Arts Council, his shows have defined a unique aesthetic that's all his own. And through them all, from 1987's Rockin' The City in Birmingham (where he exhibited alongside Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja) and the 1988 Crucial Creators exhibition in Walsall to more recent gallery events like 2007's Love Over Gold and 2012's Athleticizm collection (including portraits of London Olympics stars such as Victoria Pendleton, Tom Daley and Jessica Ennis), runs a consistent thread of energy, experimentalism and boundary-pushing. His 2013 collection, Lost Tribes, an innovative series of pieces fusing Goldie's style with the artistic expression of the ancient peoples of Africa, Asia and America was, he says, "my most important breakthrough".

And for the kid who lay awake, gazing at the stars, through the window of a children's home, growing up has brought some surprises. In 2012, he was selected as one of the BBC's New Elizabethans, 60 people - ranging from David Hockney to Roald Dahl, David Bowie and Tim Berners-Lee - who have helped shape British culture during the reign of Elizabeth II. Four years later, he was awarded the MBE in the Queen's New Year Honours. It's acceptance, of course, on a grand scale. But at heart, he's still the gatecrasher, amped-up on ideas, buzzing on nothing but love, hope and the certainty that, while his way might not be the easy way, it's very definitely the path of a true artist.

If you mainly connect the name Brahms with opulent symphonies, passionate concertos and weighty piano music, you will be in for a big surprise when you listen to the Intermezzi op. 117. The music critic Eduard Hanslick talks of a more restrained, detached style and clearly means the calm, simple and immensely expressive flowing melodies, which characterize the late piano music of this Romantic composer. Just how sensitively the performer must tackle these precious miniatures is described by Clara Schumann with the words » the intellectual technique in them demands a fine comprehension and one must be very familiar with Brahms to play them as Brahms had imagined them«.

When it comes to Brahms, Glenn Gould - famous for his analytically strict and emphatic interpretation of Bach's keyboard works - proves himself to be a true poet and thinker at the keyboard. Driven by the melancholy force, his thoughts find their way, sometimes hesitantly, then moving on with a deep breath, as it were, to the next deceleration.In op. 118 no. 1 the Canadian pianist begins with a passion that wrests expansive cascades of sound from the keyboard, then finds his way back to introvert mellifluous tones (op. 118 no. 2) and increases the drama in the will-o'-the-wispish and futile attempts to come to a redemptory final cadence (op. 118 no. 6). It would be hard to find a more closely-knit and intense rendering than on the present recording.

Musicians:

Glenn Gould (piano)

Recording: September and November 1960 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, New York

Production: J. Scianni

About Speakers Corner

At the beginning of the 90s, in the early days of audiophile vinyl re-releases, the situation was fairly straightforward. Companies such as DCC, Mobile Fidelity, Classic Records and, of course, Speakers Corner all maintained a mutual, unwritten ethical code: we would only use analogue tapes to manufacture records.

During the course of the present vinyl hype, many others have jumped on the bandwagon in the hope of securing a corner of the market. Very often they are not so ethical and use every imaginable source to master from: CDs, LPs, digital files, MP3s - or employed existant tools from the 80s and 90s for manufacturing.

A digital delay is gladly used when cutting a lacquer disc because tape machines with an analogue delay have become quite rare and are therefore expensive. When cutting the lacquer, the audio signal is delayed by one LP revolution against the signal, which controls the cutter head, and for this a digital delay is very often employed. Of course, the resultant sound signal is completely digital and thus only as good as this delay.

We should like to emphasise that Speakers Corner Records on principle only uses the original master tape as the basis for the entirely analogue cutting of lacquer discs. In addition, the pressing tool is newly manufactured as a matter of principle. We have one digital recording in our catalogue (Alan Parsons / Eye In The Sky"), but even in this particular case we used the analogue tapes for cutting.

We only employ existing tools for manufacturing if an improved result is not forthcoming, e.g. the title Elvis Is Back, which was mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray, or several titles from our Philips Classics series, which in any case Willem Makkee cut from the original masters at the Emil Berliner Studios in the 90s. It goes without saying that we only used the mother and that new tools were made for our production.

To put it in a nutshell: we can ensure you that our releases are free from any kind of digital effects - excluding the exception above - and that the lacquer discs are newly cut.

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Coupon Code: LP20

20% Off Vinyl

Cannot be combined with any other offers
Cannot be applied to previous orders
"On Sale", Bends, and titles marked "This title is not eligible for discount" excluded.
Some audio equipment not eligible for discount, please call for details (1-877-929-8729)